


Glimpses

by squidmemesinc



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Challenge: Sports Anime Shipping Olympics | SASO 2015, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-01
Updated: 2015-07-01
Packaged: 2018-04-07 05:07:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4250499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squidmemesinc/pseuds/squidmemesinc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is not the same Oikawa. You wonder what happened to him. The tail end of adolescence, maybe. The necessity of growing up. The look of it suits him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Glimpses

**Author's Note:**

> This was a fill for br3 of saso! The link is here: https://sportsanime.dreamwidth.org/4771.html?thread=1766051#cmt1766051 
> 
> The fill is there too but I did edit it very slightly between posting it then and posting it now. I have done like.... 10ish fills now but this the only one I really like enough to post on here. The writing style's a little different than what I usually do but I hope it works :0!!

 

 

one

The look on his face when they win. Triumph which, worn the way he does, looks petty from the outside. Beneath the surface, he is small and young and already slightly damaged, not yet matured to the point of forgiving someone for gifts they can’t control and didn’t choose for themselves.

This feeling—winning, to their loss—is not directed at him, or anyone on their team except for Kageyama. It’s not personal, except where it is. That was a one-on-one match they just played, with glimpses of other characters. In the end it was a contest.

You watch him as he smiles and laughs with his teammates, while your team is left silent, with their heads down, the Coach’s words passing over them like water. He’s beautiful, and he has his own power, terrifying in ways Kageyama’s is not.

 

 

two

The second time around, you win. His expression this time mirrors your own; the crack in his heart rises up to his face where the world can point it out. But only for a moment. You blink and it’s gone, and suddenly he stands taller, with his back turned to you, his shoulders lifting his strong arms to comfort his teammates.

This is not the same Oikawa. You wonder what happened to him. The tail end of adolescence, maybe. The necessity of growing up. The look of it suits him.

 

 

three

The meeting is unexpected for both of you, but he plays it off as if it had all been a part of his plan.

“Sugawara-chan, was it?”

“Suga is fine.”

“Suga-chan, then!” The smile is enough to melt you down in an instant until you’re spilling out of your shoes.

Later, he graduates to just ‘Koushi,’ and you, ‘Tooru.’

 

 

four

The last half hour of your third date has been spent upside down on the couch watching a Korean drama with far too much blood in your head. It started because you couldn’t get comfortable on the tiny loveseat right next to him without draping yourself across him somehow like some sort of ridiculous throw pillow. Between then and now, he was making fun of you by shifting and sighing in ways that made caricatures of your own movements, because teasing people is an integral part of his personality, just like gauging how much physicality you can lay on your friends before it stops being a joke is part of yours (ironically enough).

The truer part of the reality of now is a slow, thumping headache threatening to pop your eyes out of your head. Until something better comes along: you turn to look at him, notice the veins bulging out of his neck and forehead, the tomato-y color of his skin, despite his heart and blood vessels’ best efforts. Of course, you look no better, and neither of you are the tiniest bit sexy right now, which is what makes the kiss real instead of something you would indulge for ten seconds in a movie and then erase from your consciousness to fill with thoughts of what you’re going to make for dinner.

When it’s over you slide down onto the floor into the space of the recently vacated coffee table and try to move your toes, an effort which is hindered by him dropping his heavy body down on your chest and asking for another, please, Spiderman.

You get the first real feeling of his thick, smooth hair slipping beneath your admiring fingers as you point out that you were both Spiderman.

 

 

five

The boxes move into your apartment at the same time you do, hiding the small things you claim to need to live. Tooru tells you that you only need each other. You make the counterpoint that you make frequent use of the bed, less often for sleeping than for ‘other.’ And he says the bed is not in a box. Check and mate, accompanied with a wink and a peace sign.

You accept your loss gracefully with a laugh.

 

 

six

The hilltop of the park past midnight with a half-loved bottle of vodka nestled between you has become your favorite pastime. At first it was his, and you were more of the side, ‘Well, who doesn’t appreciate a good starry night?’ Aliens, Kou-chan, who doesn’t appreciate aliens? Of course, how silly of you.

You knock the inappropriateness of the situation out of your minds by embracing it fully: getting drunk at night in a place where children are found playing during all hours of the light. The justification is just that it’s two sides of the same coin, as someone, somewhere would say. Sometimes you vaguely wonder what you would tell the cops when presented with a less elastic argument, but mostly you just accept that you’re a couple of juvenile delinquents at age twenty-three. (‘Not even mid-twenties,’ Tooru says. ‘Mid-twenties is twenty-four to twenty-seven.’ The weather forecast for July of next year is this range getting pushed forward a digit.)

There’s only so many facts about alien species, fictional and ‘otherwise,’ you can listen to under the influence of several shots before your taking his words from his tongue and lips to your teeth, swallowing them down where he can’t unlock them and forcing up giggles in their place.

 

 

seven

Your lives are a machine with a rhythm, balanced and finely tuned,

 

with the parts slowly slipping out of place.

Stressful days where you come home seven hours apart are the beginning. Small arguments implicating small things like money and responsibilities, now that you have not so much of one and a lot of the other. They last minutes; backs are turned in bed, patched up with gentle, wordless touches like bandages with cartoon characters on them. You secretly (secret even to yourself, as you will find out later), keep track of who was wrong, when, and carve the offending words in small print into your heart, saving room for everything else that will ever hurt you.

The ways you’ve grown up, down, and sideways make your hinges squeak. Tooru settles his former confidences and insecurities with mood swings. Small at first, but gathering momentum. He oils his half of the hinge with alcohol, which is by nature not a good lubricant, and tends only to gum up what it’s spilled upon with stickiness and the pain of a deep-seated hangover.

For your part, you develop the impatience of a True Adult with job stress and bills and a partner to fit into neat little cubes in your head. You’re constantly repacking the boxes and every once in a while knocking them over, mixing the contents into a mess that can’t be solved by taping a piece of latex with Doraemon printed over it on your finger.

The machine of You grows older every day. You run it relentlessly, ignoring the soft clank in the engine that used to run silently and the way its back scalds anyone who dares to touch it. There are no replacement parts for a machine that evolves past being recognized by those who made it.

 

 

eight

This conversation is full of holes, just like the ones in your heart that he used to fill. The words sink into the old wood floor and become part of this house, poisoning the happy words and turning everything to dust. It seems like a waste to pull anything out of your throat that will just be swallowed up by the atmosphere, but both of you push through to the end out of respect for what was.

“After all this time, you’re just…done?”

It’s funny how you can put years and years of your life into something only to realize it stopped having a direction or any meaning to you a long time ago. You’ll never be able to pinpoint the exact moment, but little things will pop out at you in brief, horrible glimpses, even as the good ones rise up to try to convince you to change what your heart has decided for you. If you look at it from that context, it doesn’t make any sense, but you can’t shake the feeling or the pull of your feet in the other direction.

“I’m sorry, Tooru.”

The heavy silence that follows feels one-sided either direction you look at it, in the way that comes from no longer understand each other’s point of view. All the things you thought you knew about him trickle out of your head—the color of his eyes when they’re the first thing you see in the morning, the feel of the faded callouses on his fingertips brushing along your arm. The way his voice sounds when he says your name. You wonder if, in this state, when forgetting wants to be forgiven, if he would remember the last birthday you spent together, or how you look wearing your favorite shirt.

(The look on his face says he would. Your trains didn’t go off the track at the same time; yours is already plummeting straight towards the ocean, while his has just derailed.)

Quiet voices are unsuited to him; they imply danger and loneliness and fear. Insecurities breaking free of the restraints you place on them to keep them from destroying you. “Don’t you love me anymore?”

You slowly turn your palms outwards as your arms hang limply at your sides and look at the floor because you can’t think of anything kinder to say that’s true.


End file.
